Tim Mak

His reporting interests include the 2020 election campaign, national security and the role of technology in disinformation efforts.

He appears regularly on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and the NPR Politics Podcast.

Mak was one of NPR's lead reporters on the Mueller investigation and the Trump impeachment process. Before joining NPR, Mak worked as a senior correspondent at The Daily Beast, covering the 2016 presidential elections with an emphasis on national security. He has also worked on the Politico Defense team, the Politico breaking news desk and at the Washington Examiner. He has reported abroad from the Horn of Africa and East Asia.

Mak graduated with a B.A. from McGill University, where he was a valedictorian. He also currently holds a national certification as an Emergency Medical Technician.

Twice now, on March 13 and again on April 27, President Trump gathered some of the country's top corporate executives — from test producers to lab processors to major retailers — to tout his plan to make COVID-19 testing widely available. His vision: Blanket the country in drive-through testing sites.

Marc Short, the chief of staff to Vice President Pence, owns between $506,043 and $1.64 million worth of individual stocks in companies doing work related to the Trump administration's pandemic response — holdings that could run afoul of conflict of interest laws.

Third generation hog farmer Chad Leman, making his daily rounds, points to dozens of 300-pound pigs.

"These pigs should be gone," he said.

He means gone to the meatpacking plant to be processed. But with pork processing plants shut down due to worker safety concerns, he's faced with a grisly task: He needs to kill the pigs to make room for more.

And Leman isn't the only one. With meatpacking plant closures and reduced processing capacity nationwide, America's hog farmers expect an unprecedented crisis: the need to euthanize millions of pigs.

The IRS system for sending out Coronavirus relief payments is vulnerable to fraud, especially with regard to some of the nation's poorest people, according to tax and cybersecurity experts.

Because of the way the system is set up, fraudsters can obtain the Coronavirus payments of a certain segment of vulnerable Americans with just their date of birth, social security number and address — information that is easily available to criminals online.

The National Rifle Association's legal troubles have cost the powerful gun rights group $100 million, according to a recording of the group's board meeting obtained by NPR.

In the January 2020 recording, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre criticizes ongoing investigations by the New York and Washington, D.C., attorneys general, bemoaning "the power of weaponized government." And he told the NRA's board of directors, assembled for the group's winter meeting in January, that the organization has had to make $80 million in cuts to stay afloat.

Sen. Richard Burr's sale of up to $1.7 million in stocks shortly before the recent market crash was one of the lawmaker's only market-beating trades since record keeping began eight years ago, according to a new study.

The new analysis, presented by researchers at Dartmouth College, shows just how unusual the North Carolina senator's transactions were. On a single day, Feb. 13 of this year, Burr unloaded a significant portion of his net worth — a departure from his typically low-volume trading history.